


Past and Present

by solrosan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 02:32:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4122687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solrosan/pseuds/solrosan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve brings Natasha to meet Peggy after the events of CATWS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past and Present

**Author's Note:**

> This one doesn't really work out time-line wise, but I wrote it at work without proper access to resources to look things up.

Natasha was riding the elevator with Steve, who was more properly dressed than she’d ever seen him in civilian clothes. Not formal, but proper. It was cute, and a little bit sad. 

She was nervous; she hadn’t thought she would be, but she was. Really nervous, actually. They were going to meet Peggy Carter, the former SHIELD agent, and – for a lack of a better word – Steve’s sweetheart. Peggy Carter was a bit of a legend, and when Steve had asked Natasha to come with him to her retirement home, she’d said yes without hesitation. Natasha had heard stories, from Steve and from people (mostly women) in the agency. The other agents always spoke about Agent Carter with the utmost respect and admiration; Steve always spoke about her with a small laughter in his voice, and a sorrow in his eyes. From what she could understand, Agent Carter had been quite a woman.

They both took a deep breath as the elevator stopped at the seventh floor. As the doors opened, they exchanged embarrassed looks, but it was rather nice to know the other was nervous too – even if for completely different reasons.

“Thank you for coming with me,” Steve said as they walked through the corridor to Peggy’s room. 

“It’s purely for research purposes,” she said, with the hint of a smile. “So I’ll know what I should be looking for, since the nurse didn’t work out.”

Steve smiled. It was nice to see him do that again, after the chaos with Bucky he had been rather withdrawn. He straightened up – as if he ever didn’t have perfect posture – and knocked on the door with the small sign saying _12 M. Sousa_. Natasha didn’t know if Steve didn’t look at the sign intentionally, or if he just knew the way to Peggy’s room by heart and didn’t need to. 

A small voice from the other side asked them to come in. The room was small, and not all that charming. A bit impersonal, if you asked Natasha. It looked like the caregiving facility it was, and a part of Natasha felt genuinely saddened that the great Agent Carter would end her days here. Old age scared her, to be honest. Losing her ability to fight, to fend for herself, to think clearly. To lose all the things that she treasured as her. It was frightening that strong, independent people ended up like everyone else, defeated by time. It wasn’t something Natasha liked having to face or think about.

“Hello, Peggy,” Steve said, as soon as he stepped into the room, seemingly unfazed by the room itself. 

The woman in question was lying under a crocheted quilt, on a bed with lots of pillows. She looked as far from the legend she was, as Natasha thought possible, but she brightened up when she heard Steve’s voice, and she squinted her eyes in an attempt to see him better. 

“Steve!” she said, sitting up more properly in the bed. “It’s about time, the nurses don’t tell me anything.”

Steve chuckled, pulling up a chair to the bed, but instead of sitting down he pointed at Natasha. “I brought a friend, I hope it’s okay.”

“Who is it? Not Howard’s son, again, right?”

“No, it’s not Tony,” Steve said, with a smile that made Natasha think really needed to ask what had happened when Tony had come here. “It’s Agent Natasha Romanoff, she was with me when Bucky…”

He trailed off, and both the women gave him a moment of privacy by turning their attention to each other. 

“Come closer, Agent,” Peggy said, waving at Natasha, who still stood linger at the door. “I can just make out that you’re a redhead from over there.”

Natasha stepped up to the bed and held out her hand. It surprised her how strong the old woman’s hand still was. “It’s an honor to meet you, ma’am. Steve never stops talking about you.”

“You’re just saying that to make him look better.”

Natasha smiled, it was true. 

“Romanoff, that’s Russian, isn’t it?” Peggy then asked, still without letting go of Natasha’s hand. 

Natasha nodded. “I was born in Soviet Russia.”

“And now you fight side-by-side with Captain America,” Peggy mussed, more to herself than to anyone else. “How the world keeps turning.”

“Peggy,” Steve said, as if asking her to watch what she was saying.

“It’s okay,” Natasha said quickly, but she took her hand back. “I don’t quite get it myself, either.” She thought about it for a moment, turning to Steve. “If you tell Clint I said that, I’ll kill you.”

“Clint’s the archer, right?” Peggy asked, frowning, and making her already wrinkled face even more so.

“Yes.”

“See, I don’t forget everything,” Peggy said, triumphantly. “Were you trained in Russia too, Natasha?”

“Yes.”

Peggy hummed, holding up a finger to Steve. “You better watch this one, Steve. Some of the best agents I met came out of Moscow. Trained them since they were children, handcuffed them to their beds. God knows what else they did to them. Hopefully they closed that dreadful place down when the Iron Curtain fell.”

Natasha got a sour taste in her mouth, and she could feel her smile becoming stiff and unnatural. Luckily, Peggy didn’t seem to notice that – bless her poor eyesight – but Steve gave Natasha a strange look which she decided to ignore. She had no idea what agents Peggy was talking about, or if they had been trained in the Red Room, but it wouldn’t surprise her one bit if those agents’ experiences had been like hers, or worse. 

“Now, Steve,” Peggy said, turning her entire attention to Steve. “Sit down and tell me about Bucky.”

* * *

They took the elevator back down to the entrance. Steve stood at ease, his hands behind his back and his eyes straight ahead; he seemed very composed, even with the small wrinkle between his eyebrows that meant he was trying to put things into the right context.

Natasha kept glancing up at him. It surprised her how many times she had time to do that while descending seven floors. It had been a rather intense meeting, and she had felt more than a little in the way when the two oldies talked memories, and Peggy helped Steve relate new things to the old things from their mutual youth – when she had remembered that Steve had died and come back, that was. 

Then there had been the long conversation about Bucky; Natasha hadn’t truly realized until now what Bucky Barnes had meant to Steve, and what he probably still meant to him. Bucky had been his Clint.

When they stepped out of the retirement home, Steve took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the terrible Washington air and visibly shaking off his discomfort. Then he looked at Natasha, still with that small wrinkle between his eyes.

“They haven’t closed that place, have they? The place where they handcuffs girls to beds.”

Natasha shrugged. “I did most of my training behind the Iron Curtain. Who knows what’s going on there now?”

“But you…?”

“I’ve never been handcuffed to a bed,” she said, taking him under the arm to reassure him that everything was okay. “At least not without my utmost consent.”

“Why would you let anyone do that?”

“Peggy can explain that to you next time you come here.”

Steve’s eyes grew wide when the penny dropped, and his earlobes grew adorably red.

“Don’t worry about me,” Natasha said. “I came out of there alive, and without it I wouldn’t get to work with Captain America, after all.”

“I don’t know if that can be counted as any kind of prize.”

“Well, it’s not nothing,” Natasha said, smiling. “And it worked well for Peggy.”

“She’s my girl, Natasha,” Steve said after a moment, nodding. “I know what you’re doing when you’re trying to set me up with people, and I appreciate it, but… she’s my girl. I mean, I know that in a couple of years she’ll… but as long as she…”

Natasha patted his arm. The “it should have been us” was so painfully obvious that Natasha felt guilty for every suggestion she had passed his way. 

“Thank you for taking me to meet her,” she said to change the topic slightly.

“You would have liked her.”

“I _like_ her.”

“Thanks,” he said, smiling as if he had received a compliment. “You would have liked her, though, back then.”

Natasha laughed. “She would have killed me, by the sound of it.”

The winkle between his eyes came back, but he didn’t say anything else. Natasha didn’t feel quite comfortable with the small fragments he had got about her childhood (the only part of her past not already on the internet…), and the conclusions he might come to, but, she realized, it was a trade of confidence. He had taken her to meet the closest thing he had to a family, so maybe it was all right that he knew her a little bit better by the end of the day, as well.


End file.
